On a hot, windy "red-flag"-warning Labor Day in 2007, a spark on Plumas County forestland ignited a conflagration that would ultimately char 65,000 acres in northeastern California. Hundreds of firefighters needed more than two weeks to contain the so-called Moonlight Fire, which killed 15 million trees — some of them more than 400 years old — and reduced 46,000 acres of public land to moonscape.

Then the fire fight turned to the courtroom.